The Better Project is funded by the European Union’s Horizon program and the UK Research and Innovation Program. Its aim is to support the improvement of the European citizen’s health by creating a robust decentralised infrastructure which will enable healthcare professionals to exploit the full potential of larger sets of multi-source health data via tailor-made AI tools useful to compare, integrate, and analyse in a secure, cost-effective fashion across national borders, fully complying with present GDPR privacy guidelines.

In recent years data-driven medicine has gained increasing importance in terms of diagnosis, treatment and research due to the exponential growth of healthcare data. The linkage of health data from various sources, including genomics, and analysis via innovative approaches based on artificial intelligence (AI) advanced the understanding of risk factors, causes and development of optimal treatment in different disease areas. Furthermore, it contributed to the development of a high-quality accessible health care system. However, medical study results often depend on the amount of available patient data, crucially when it comes to rare diseases this dependency is accentuated. Typically, the more data is available for the intended analysis or the scientific hypotheses, the more accurate the results are. Nevertheless, the reuse of patient data for medical research is often limited to data sets available at a single medical centre.